The Homewood Calumet Country Club has plans to transform the golf course into a logistics park and construction could start either next spring or summer. The property is located northwest of Dixie Highway and 175th Street and could accommodate about 800,000 square feet of warehouse and distribution buildings. Potential tenants could include national retailers and e-commerce firms.
An article in the Chicago Tribune states that plans for the logistics park would include the following:
- Four new buildings
- Roadway improvements
- Flood control measures
- Additional landscape buffers
- Gas station and convenience store
The project could create 650 to 1,000 jobs according to CBRE Group, Inc. CBRE have been hired by the golf course's owner, Arizona-based Diversified Partners LLC.
The club was found back in 1901 and was annexed to the town of Homewood in 1980.
The owners of the club, which had a pending sale to Diversified at that time, filed a petition in July 2019 in Cook County Circuit Court to detach the property from Homewood.
Homeowners who live nearby had a lot of concerns and expressed their feelings at village meetings about the truck traffic and noise that this kind of redevelopment would create.
The village is contesting the deannexation action in an effort to maintain some control over the redevelopment.
Demand has driven industrial vacancy rates down all throughout the Chicago market with a vacancy rate of 2.6%. In the third quarter, the industrial vacancy rate in the south suburban submarket was 2.7% according to CBRE.
We are seeing retailers, e-commerce and other firms wanting to speed deliveries to their customers and this has made it very desirable for distribution sites to be closer to major metropolitan areas. This coupled with limited availability of existing warehouse product will drive demand for the Homewood project.
"This is a rare opportunity to establish a distribution center with this level of access to the Chicago market, as well as have the ability to design a facility with trailer-storage-ratio greater than any industrial park in the region."
Senior Vice President with CBRE | Jason Lev
The company said that the south suburbs were leading the Chicago area submarket for industrial construction as of the third quarter with a little more than 4 million square feet underway.
Amazon fulfillment centers under construction in Markham and Matteson, for example, have a footprint of a bit less than 900,000 square feet but the multi-floor facilities will each have total floor space of more than 3 million square feet.
In Country Club Hills, where an outlet mall had originally been planned, Logistics Property Company is at work on a logistics hub that will have more than 1.2 million square feet of warehouse distribution space to tenants.
In Homewood, Diversified had talked with village officials about a redevelopment plan that included a mix of office and industrial use, then later a proposal for more than 100 age restricted housing units.
Unfortunately, no residential developers were interested in taking on the project and instead offered other uses, including storage of shipping containers and a facility for crushing and recycling concrete and road construction debris. The Homewood site would have available storage for more than 1,000 truck trailers.
The Real Deal reported that the industrial sector has been among the few bright spots in real estate during the pandemic. Amazon, for example, has been on a logistics and warehouse leasing tear, and recently announced plans to open 1,000 warehouses in suburbs across the country.
